The Crisis of Modern Times: Perspectives from The Review of Politics, 1939-1962

17 “Authority in the Twentieth Century” (1956)

C h a p t e r 1 7 Authority in the Twentieth Century Hannah Arendt Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was born in Hanover, Germany. She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger at Marburg University, and earned her doctoral degree at the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Karl Jaspers. During World War II, she escaped to New York City where she first worked in the field of publishing and then went on to teach political philosophy at Princeton, the University of Chicago, and the New School for Social Research. In her first major political work, The Origins of Totalitarianism , Arendt claimed that the regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia constituted a new form of dictatorship—totalitarianism. In writing this study and subsequent works, Arendt distanced herself from past conceptual and empirical approaches to political philosophy. Her goal was to reconstruct political theorizing in terms of a phenomenological examination of the human experience. Following Heidegger, she considered the autonomy of the political realm to be threatened by the social and historical forces of the twentieth century . Thus, Arendt spent much of her career seeking to uncover and preserve the distinctive structures and characteristics of authentic political activity. I The rise of fascist, communist and totalitarian movements and the development of the two totalitarian regimes, Stalin’s after 1929 and Hitler’s after 1938, took place against a background of a more or less general, more or less dramatic breakdown of all traditional authorities. Nowhere was this breakdown the direct result of the regimes or movements themselves, but it seemed as though totalitarianism , in the form of regimes as well as of movements, was best fitted to take 325 advantage of a general political and social atmosphere in which the validity of authority itself was radically doubted. The most extreme manifestation of this climate which, with minor geographical and chronological exceptions, has been the atmosphere of our century since its inception, is the gradual breakdown of the one form of authority which exists in all historically known societies, the authority of parents over children, of teachers over pupils and, generally of the elders over the young. Even the least “authoritarian ” forms of government have always accepted this kind of “authority” as a matter of course. It has always seemed to be required as much by natural needs, the helplessness of the child, as by political necessity, the continuity of an established civilization which can be assured only if those who are newcomers by birth are guided through a preestablished world into which they are born as strangers. Because of its simple and elementary character, this form of a strictly limited authority has, throughout the history of political thought, been used and abused as a model for very different and much less limited authoritarian systems.1 It seems that ours is the first century in which this argument no longer carries an overwhelming weight of plausibility and it announced its anti-authoritarian spirit nowhere more radically than when it promised the emancipation of youth asanoppressedclassandcalleditself the“centuryof thechild.”Icannotherefollow the implications of this early self-interpretation which are manifold, nor am Inowinterestedinthevariousschoolsof “progressiveeducation”wherethisprinciple found its realization. But it may be worth noting that the anti-authoritarian position has been driven to the extreme of education without authority only in the United States, the most egalitarian and the least tradition-bound country of the West, where precisely the results of this radical experiment are now, more than any other single political or social factor, leading to a reevaluation of the very concept of authority. Neo-Conservatism, which has won a surprisingly large following in recent years, is primarily cultural and educational, and not political or social, in outlook; it appeals to a mood and concern which are direct results of theeliminationof authorityfromtherelationshipbetweenyoungandold,teacher and pupil, parents and children. I mentioned this strangest, but in other respects least interesting, aspect of theproblemof authorityinourworldonlybecauseitshowstowhatextremesthe general decline of authority could go, even to the neglect of obvious natural necessities . For this indicates how very unlikely it is that we shall find in our century the rise of authentic authoritarian forms of government and, hence, how careful we must be lest we mistake tyrannical forms of government, which rule by order 326 Hannah Arendt and decree, for authoritarian structures. Our century, it is true, has seen quite a number of new variations of tyranny and dictatorship, among which we must count the fascist...